Scientist treats her breast cancer using lab-grown viruses

Croatian scientist Beata Halassy successfully treated her stage 3 breast cancer using lab-grown viruses, avoiding chemotherapy.

In Short

• A scientist treated her own breast cancer with an experimental vaccine
• The experimental vaccine uses viruses to treat late-stage cancer
• The scientist is now cancer-free

A 50-year-old scientist, Beata Halassy, treated her own stage 3 breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses. Halassy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, discovered her breast cancer in 2020 at the same place where she had undergone a previous mastectomy.

Since this was a second recurrence, she sought to treat it on her own because she couldn't face another bout of chemotherapy, according to a report in Nature.

Halassy's case study has been published in the journal Vaccines which revealed that the virologist started trying an unproven treatment for cancer by combining a measles virus and a flu-like pathogen to create a potent shot that attacked the tumour directly and helped the immune system.

Following this treatment, Halassy has been cancer-free for four years. This self-administered experimental vaccine called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT) helped her treat the stage 3 cancer.

MORE ABOUT THE TREATMENT

OVT is an emerging field of cancer treatment which uses viruses to both attack cancerous cells and then provoke the immune system to fight them.

Most OVT clinical trials have been conducted on late-stage, metastatic cancer. But in the past few years, scientists have been directing its application to early-stage cancers as well.

According to Halassy, the measles virus and a vesicular stomatitis virus included in the shot, have been known to infect a type of cell from which her tumour originated.

Learning this, she was able to combine the viruses in perfect doses and used it to treat herself. Till now, both the pathogens have been used in OVT clinical trials. The measles virus has been trialled against metastatic breast cancer.

As per the report, Halassy is advocating using OVT as the first line of treatment for cancer instead of current procedures like surgery, chemotherapy, biological therapy, or radiation.

The medical research community is seemingly divided over Halassy's self-treatment of cancer. Authors of the study, who published Halassy's case in Vaccines, however, discourage self-medicating with OVT.

"The authors of this isolated and unconventional work clearly state that self-medicating with oncolytic viruses should not be the first approach to dealing with diagnosed cancer, but wish to encourage formal clinical trials of assessing OVT as neoadjuvant therapy in early cancer," they wrote.